Blogs

About this blog

AIXpert Blog is about the AIX operating system from IBM running on POWER based machines called Power Systems and software related to it like PowerVM for virtualisation, PowerVC for Deploying VM's and PowerSC for security plus performance monitoring and nmon

If you don't mind using mind using Excel also take a look and the nmon Analyser above

Ignore the videos which are more than 2 years old as they are based on older versions although they are still mostly true.

I regularly get asked: How to use the graphs to work out what is wrong and what to tune? I either laugh out laud or shake my head.

Its like asking a surgeon can they explain on this envelope how to replace a human heart!

My best advice it to work in a benchmark centre for 2 years or get access to a machine and find a performance expert that will mentor you for a four years.

Second best take IBM AIX Performance Education, read the manual pages for every performance tool, run nmon while generating artificial workloads so you can see the cause and effect then read my AIXpert Blogs for the last 4 years, go to the IBM Technical University conferences and buy the IBM gurus a few beers.

Plus learn to program in C (See K&R) and write code for 10 years (See UNIX Network Programming by Stevens), understand how a RDBMS functions at the system call level, read the entire UNIX/AIX/Linux documentation, learn the UNIX/AIX/Linux kernel source code (See Lions Commentary on the UNIX 6th Edition and The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice Bach) and deliver training courses on the UNIX Kernel and device driver writing. Finally, write a performance monitoring tool for 15+ years and support it in your own time - because it worked for me.